J.K., Meet G.R.R.
Well, as anyone in the writing game no doubt knows by now, JK Rowling has revealed that she has an ironclad rule that “you don’t have sex near unicorns”. Now, as a piece of advice about what one should, in general, have sex near, I suppose this might make sense. But if one reads more about the interview where she said this to gain some context, it becomes clear that she’s talking about how the fact that she is now writing outside the fantasy genre means she’s allowed to go in directions she couldn’t with the Harry Potter series. But here’s the thing: I can understand how JK Rowling might not need to know much about all the other fantasy books out there, but I would have thought she’d be at least vaguely aware of, say, George R R Martin.
Okay, granted there are technically no unicorns in Game of Thrones, but I submit that it is a fantasy series, with dragons and everything, and someone in it had sex near just about everything else, sooner or later (including dragons – I could have chosen a picture that illustrated that, but this is a classy blog).
Anyway, I thought this bit from the article was a bit odd as well:
“I didn’t do the final edit that I normally do before I hand it to the editors, and it definitely shows,” she said, sounding almost like a self-published author.
I’m just not quite sure how a quote that actually refers to one’s traditional editor at a traditional publisher makes one sound like a self-published author.
Just a weird old interview, all around.